The studs are a mechanical feature, true, but they're also a mark.
It is internationally accepted that things that are patented cannot be copyrighted. The whole concept of a patent system is about bringing a new idea into the public domain.
does well in the market simply by ditching quality and undercutting LEGO on price, but there you go.
dude, not everyone can afford bricks with Lego's price markup. think about the children (heh) who won't get any bricks because of your selfish love of a particular brand.
purely from the selfish POV of someone who likes quality bricks, this ruling kind of sucks.
But you can spread the idea in other threads. This is what counts, karma points do not. You're reply is enough satisfaction.
Re:This is highly interesting
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
You're mixing up the infection rate and the lethality. A milder (i.e. less lethal) virus need not spread any slower. And a less lethal virus will have an advantage over a more lethal virus if both infect equally easily since the less lethal virus will be able to spread for a longer period of time per host on average. With something with as high a mutation rate as a flu virus that makes a huge difference.
You do not understand lethality. A virus does not have the goal to be lethal. Being lethal on purpose is a self-defeating evolutionary trait for a virus. They are only lethal as far as it helps them to 'survive' (not being a living organism) by forcing the host to mass-produce new copies too quickly in order to spread them further to other hosts. Depending on the situation this is a winning strategy, even if it completely destroys the host (especially good for airborne diseases).
However, the more tightly packed groups of people are the longer it may take that advantage to make a difference, since both a highly lethal and a less lethal strain might have plenty of time to exhaust the local population of hosts before people start dying.
The more agressive virus will spread quicker and gain more 'market share'. The slower one will follow, but will mostly meet hosts already wasted by the first one.
What I read from your quote is that when the population of hosts does not have close contacts only the mild strains have a chance to reach the next host. Those that multiply too fast do not reach the next one. Imagine a sparsely populated world in which people do not meet with other people for days. The agressive strains take themselves out of the gene pool (together with their hosts).
OTOH when milions of people are packed together in a closed environment, the more virulent strains can prosper and take over the slow-movers. It's not that the mild strains "loose", they are still in the background but what we see is the activity of the quick-movers.
An interesting conclusion is that a rising world population living in megacities equals a dense environment, equals an improving environment for viri.
More people, => more pandemics, => less people, ad nauseam. What comes to mind is the concept of the self-regulating Gaia. Or Orson Scott Card's Lusitania.
These suits want to achive a long-term scare factor: "we have a bigger war chest and look what we can do to you in the court" so that nobody dares to speak out.
She should create a defense fund where people could donate money. After all, how much do we value our Freedom to Know (CC)?
And then there should exist an universal defense fund which would have the mission to support whistleblowers and to counter Big Money (R). (the ACLU does this kind of work pro bono, but I am talking about an exclusive fund for free speech ).
that we are basicly forced to comment on TFA before we actually read it.
I'm serious, my fellow Slashdoters. Take this article for example. It's a 20 pages PDF. It would take me ca. 1 hour to read it through 'with proper understanding'. Then I would need at least a day to think it over and come up with further insights.
Unfortunately, the comments to an article are opened immediately. The result is that people who comment early and often, who comment without READING TFA do drown down all later comments. There is no point for late commers to comment at the bottom of the thread. At that point the discussion has usually already moved to the next 'newsbite du jour'.
In a perfect world we would get informed about the article first. Then there would be an commenting embargo period to RTFA. Only then would the comments open to allow commenting for everyone who at that point did read TFA. That's how scientific seminars do work. Everyone gets the paper copy before the seminar, so that they have time to study it.
Slashdot is an instant gratification world. It copies the worst of TV. Just like the awful 24h news cycle is filled with 30s sound bites of junkformation.
My conclusion is that the present form of Slashdot comments does not facilitate an informed discussion. It's merely an exercise in Frist Psoting and +1:Funny'ing around.
Let me first clarify one thing, I do not disparage OSC because his politics are right-wing (although he calls himself a moderate Democrat). My criticism goes beyond that. I would criticize a left-wing columnist in the same manner if one ever demanded that the opposition of the government MUST vote as the government wishes.
Card is a follower of authoritarianism. This can be clearly read from this column. This is not simply a result of a post-9/11 change in thinking, which would be understandable, but a life-long tendency. As I said, Card has written a book about a future universe which HAS to be ruled by a tyrant, or there will be chaos and anarchy.
In his books he is not writing that ruthless tyranny is either good or bad. What he is doing is much worse, he is writing that TYRANNY IS NECESSARY.
If you need a better example to understand this, OSC spend his life writing an apology for people like Saddam Hussain (and yes, even Hitler). Saddam could argue that gassing the Kurds, butchering the Shia uprising, this all was necessary to return Iraq to proper order under his leadership.
-- -- -- Now, what you have written to me as a response goes in the same line of thought. You are arguing, that when the executive power (the president) makes a decision, the Senate must not question it. There are several reasons why this approach is wrong and leads straight to despotism.
1. The senators had the right to go on record, that they believed that Rice is the wrong candidate. Voting against her was a way of showing that. When they voted they knew that she would be confirmed anyway.
2. The process is called 'confirmation hearings' for a reason. If it was the President's sole perogative, there would be no need for them. The president's less important decisions do not need a confirmation.
3. To use your words, "the people have [NOT] spoken". Nobody elected C.Rice, she got appointed by the President. GWB got elected, but it does not follow that it is the will of the people that Rice shall be the secretary of state. A more recent example is the nomination of Miers to the Supreme Court. Even GWB's hardcore electorate is against it, which shows that he does not represent even their will.
4. All authoritarians have a deep disregard for parliaments, because they are an obstacle for their unchecked power. Throughout history they have argued, that they, a single person, are the true voice of the will of the people, and the rotten, corrupt parliaments are not.
This is a monstrous fallacy. It should be obvious to anyone that a larger elected body is closer to the electorate than a smaller one. The perfect case is the Athenian or Swiss form of direct democracy. The rule of a single person is on the opposite side of the scale. An elected government without a pluralistic parliament is not a democracy. It is an elected tyranny. -- -- -- As regards Riefenstahl, there are no analogies to Moore. She was a producer of propaganda FOR the government, M.Moore is producing propaganda AGAINST it. (I'd agree that he is a propagandist. I observed that Moore does not give people a fair chance of explaining themselves in the 'shocumentaries'.)
And it was not my goal to say that Card is like Riefenstahl. I meant that Card believes that military victories are the result of the stronger will, not the better strategy. In Card's mind, the US can only win in Iraq by being more stubborn than the insurgents, not smarter.
OSC hates the democratic process. He glorifes ruthlessness, hierarchic controls and mindless unity. It's not simply the Ender trilogy, which I base this on.
Democracy cannot exist without dissent. It's a trademark of authoritarian and totalitarian systems that they demand that there never be any dissent. Card DEMANDS that the opposition must never show any disagreement with the current government, because the enemies COULD interpret this as a lack of unity and determination. (exactly how many Jihadis were watching the confirmation hearings, heh?) Apparently OSC is a strong believer in the 'Triumph of the Will'.
2. Did you read Songmaster, a novel which actually predates Ender's Game?
In this novel OSC shows a universe in which all inhabited planets are incorporated in one Empire. Through the words and actions of the characters he argues that the Emperor needs to be the most ruthless person in the world, or the empire fall into anarchy and infighting. His successor must be even more ruthless and a non-violent change of leadership is not possible - he has to kill the predecessor to show off his ruthlessness.
Maybe Ender's game isn't a glorification of Hitler, but Songmaster definitely is.
p.s I read the first homecoming book. Nothing about democracy there.
And I just counted that I have 14 books by OSC on the shelf next to my elbow. So sad. I even met OSC twice at book fairs.
Recently I read some right-wing lunatic, post-9/11 columns by him. No attempt at reasoning, only 'must follow the leader; dissent is treason' kind of diatribe. That's when I noticed that he is an authoritarian.
Did you notice that in his books, democracies are the weaklings and loosers, and the strong (or shrewd) win? And what's with this fascination with genocide?
We westerners have always done this kind of thing to Asia! I want my government to promote our monopolies abroad. I offer you five words: British East India Tea Company.
All right! That's the fine mercantilist spirit!
While we're at it, let's reinstitute the free trade in opium! I think we could sue China through the WTO Arbitrage Court for unlawful protectionism of their domestic agriculture market.
We like to think we know everything. How can we say there is global warming when we have maybe 100 years on the subject. Same thing for Hurricanes.
Global warming is 'controversial' only as long as one forgets three undeniable facts: melted water lakes in the middle of Greenland, glacier melting and permafrost melting. We have more than 100 years on documented data on the length of glaciers and they have been getting smaller at an accelarated pace.
These phenomena can not be explained by anything else than a long term change in climatic conditions.
> We have a number of patents pending, > most of which we filed for three years ago, > before we announced details of the product > and offered it for sale. > (This is, of course, a requirement of law.)
As you surely know, patent aplications are published after 18 months. At this point it is possible to claim quasi-ownership of the invention. To quote Wikipedia: "The marking [patent pending] serves to notify potential infringers who would copy the invention that they may be liable for damages once a patent is issued." I believe this should successfully deter the competition to the same extent as a regular patent.
> Companies don't start up, swamp the world with their product, > IPO and make everyone billionaires in a couple of months. > You're still stuck in Internet bubble fantasy land. > 3-5 years is not an unreasonable time just to get a company > going, much less actually benefit from the first few years of hard work.
It is my opinion that if it takes as much as 3 years for a company to come up with a product, it's doing something wrong. 3 years is almost a whole era in IT terms (almost as long as the span between Windows releases ) I suggest that you propose a software patent duration that would be satisfactory.
I didn't come up with the 3-5 years out of nowhere. It's part of Bezos' proposal, which I quote below.
------ 1. That the patent laws should recognize that business method and software patents are fundamentally different than other kinds of patents.
2. That business method and software patents should have a much shorter lifespan than the current 17 years -- I would propose 3 to 5 years. This isn't like drug companies, which need longpatent windows because of clinical testing, or like complicated physical processes, where you might have to tool up and build factories. Especially in the age of the Internet, a good software innovation can catch a lot of wind in 3 or 5 years. [...] If done right -- and it could take 2 years or more -- we'll end up with a patent system that produces fewer patents (fewer people will bother to apply for 3 or 5 year patents, and fewerpatents means less work for the overworked Patent and Trademark Office), fewer bad patents (because of the pre-issuance comment period), and even the good patents won't last longer than is necessary to give the innovator a reasonable return (at Internet speed, you don't need 17 years). Bottom line: fewer patents, of higher average quality, with shorter lifetimes.
... only Software Patents which last for 20 years.
Patents have a limited duration time for a reason. On one hand they give the owner a temporary monopoly to use them commercially, so that he can recuperate his expenses on R&D. That's a good thing. On the other hand the law accepts that knowledge should belong to everyone, after the patent expires.
The patent duration should be adjusted to the area of research and they sometimes are. For example, in some countries patents on drugs can be extended by 5 years, because the approval process and clinical test can take up 12-15 years during which the company canot sell the drug and is loosing money.
The maximum duration of software patents should be short, ca. 3-5 years. This would give startup companies protection for their new products against blatant rip-offs by big, uncreative companies. On the other hand it would not be possible to use your portfolio of 10,000 patents from the 80s as a strategic weapon to mug the weak (aka the 'IBM tax') or nuke your competition.
Unfortunately international trade agreements (GATT) have fixed the minimum duration of patents for ALL INVENTIONS at 20 years. It's almost impossible to change international agreements. The consequence is that when a country defines software as an invention, it can not give it a shorter patent duration. The only way out would be to define a special status to software inventions.
p.s. I'm not trolling here. I'm posting this under my regular username.
If it's viral, then from now on let's call it the word-of-mouth disease. We had something similar in the EU in 2001 and it left awful memories of burning carcasses. That should teach the marketing gnomes!
( unfortunately, this means starting a new meme, which itself would be a viral... , oy, recurrency. )
I think you miss the point of the story. A hint is burried in the last sentence:
Quote:The technology for the new design seems to be in it's infancy, but Japan has proven once again that it's a least 10 years ahead of everyone else.
It's simply a gadget to troll for sarcastic comments from the clueless gaijin. ( I wonder what the people at/..jp think about it. )
[Julia] believed, for instance, having learnt it at school, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. (In his own schooldays, Winston remembered, in the late fifties, it was only the helicopter that the Party claimed to have invented; a dozen years later, when Julia was at school, it was already claiming the aeroplane; one generation more, and it would be claiming the steam engine.) And when he told her that aeroplanes had been in existence before he was born and long before the Revolution, the fact struck her as totally uninteresting. After all,
what did it matter who had invented aeroplanes?
P.S. Steve Jobs invented nothing. CEO's don't invent, the nameless engineers at Apple invent. 'nate.oo' is a jerk for continuing this awful CEO worship cult of the '90s. I wish Orwell wrote that above passage as Big Brother inventing helicopters.
Shihar, I read your comment here: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=146002&cid =12228868. "What people don't realize is that often times the people that make the technology and the people that build the technology are two very different people."
That's an observation I had myself. (Patents allow to set up specialized research companies which are separated from the production industry.) I'd like to discuss this topic with you, per email. I don't know your email adress, if you could contact me at: mg20163 AT sgh.waw.pl
It is very obvious that the USPTO management doesn't care about examiner attrition. If they did, they would have figured out safeguards against it long ago. But why should they? After all, there are always people wanting jobs there, if not birth Americans, then all the Vietnamese, Indians, and Ethiopians who have gotten their citizenships.
This reminids me of how electronic arts treats it newcomer employees. They come cheap and are expendable.
The ozone layer was saved only because of "one group of people (scientists and politicians) forcing their opinions down the throats of the rest of the population (that's you), that population before forced to live under and according to the designing and ruling group's theories (also called science)."
The Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer was signed by 183 nations. No amount of arogant libertarian-utopian whining will change the fact that YOU are not allowed to pump CFCs into the atmosphere even if you really wanted to.
See, here in the real world we think that SOME rules need to aply to everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
The studs are a mechanical feature, true, but they're also a mark.
It is internationally accepted that things that are patented cannot be copyrighted. The whole concept of a patent system is about bringing a new idea into the public domain.
does well in the market simply by ditching quality and undercutting LEGO on price, but there you go.
dude, not everyone can afford bricks with Lego's price markup. think about the children (heh) who won't get any bricks because of your selfish love of a particular brand.
purely from the selfish POV of someone who likes quality bricks, this ruling kind of sucks.
no, it doesn't. you can still buy Legos(tm).
this mutation would have dominated the species milions of years ago.
In a world of cats, fear is the superior evolutionary trait.
But you can spread the idea in other threads. This is what counts, karma points do not. You're reply is enough satisfaction.
What I read from your quote is that when the population of hosts does not have close contacts only the mild strains have a chance to reach the next host. Those that multiply too fast do not reach the next one. Imagine a sparsely populated world in which people do not meet with other people for days. The agressive strains take themselves out of the gene pool (together with their hosts).
OTOH when milions of people are packed together in a closed environment, the more virulent strains can prosper and take over the slow-movers. It's not that the mild strains "loose", they are still in the background but what we see is the activity of the quick-movers.
An interesting conclusion is that a rising world population living in megacities equals a dense environment, equals an improving environment for viri.
More people, => more pandemics, => less people, ad nauseam. What comes to mind is the concept of the self-regulating Gaia. Or Orson Scott Card's Lusitania.
These suits want to achive a long-term scare factor: "we have a bigger war chest and look what we can do to you in the court" so that nobody dares to speak out.
She should create a defense fund where people could donate money. After all, how much do we value our Freedom to Know (CC)?
And then there should exist an universal defense fund which would have the mission to support whistleblowers and to counter Big Money (R). (the ACLU does this kind of work pro bono, but I am talking about an exclusive fund for free speech ).
ScuttleMonkey: Open Source Not That Open?
ScuttleMonkey: Open Source Forming a Dot Com Bubble?
Hemos: Open Source Design in risk?
That's more FUD in two days that I would expect from Micro$oft!
that we are basicly forced to comment on TFA before we actually read it.
I'm serious, my fellow Slashdoters. Take this article for example. It's a 20 pages PDF. It would take me ca. 1 hour to read it through 'with proper understanding'. Then I would need at least a day to think it over and come up with further insights.
Unfortunately, the comments to an article are opened immediately. The result is that people who comment early and often, who comment without READING TFA do drown down all later comments. There is no point for late commers to comment at the bottom of the thread. At that point the discussion has usually already moved to the next 'newsbite du jour'.
In a perfect world we would get informed about the article first. Then there would be an commenting embargo period to RTFA. Only then would the comments open to allow commenting for everyone who at that point did read TFA. That's how scientific seminars do work. Everyone gets the paper copy before the seminar, so that they have time to study it.
Slashdot is an instant gratification world. It copies the worst of TV. Just like the awful 24h news cycle is filled with 30s sound bites of junkformation.
My conclusion is that the present form of Slashdot comments does not facilitate an informed discussion. It's merely an exercise in Frist Psoting and +1:Funny'ing around.
Let me first clarify one thing, I do not disparage OSC because his politics are right-wing (although he calls himself a moderate Democrat). My criticism goes beyond that. I would criticize a left-wing columnist in the same manner if one ever demanded that the opposition of the government MUST vote as the government wishes.
Card is a follower of authoritarianism. This can be clearly read from this column. This is not simply a result of a post-9/11 change in thinking, which would be understandable, but a life-long tendency. As I said, Card has written a book about a future universe which HAS to be ruled by a tyrant, or there will be chaos and anarchy.
In his books he is not writing that ruthless tyranny is either good or bad. What he is doing is much worse, he is writing that TYRANNY IS NECESSARY.
If you need a better example to understand this, OSC spend his life writing an apology for people like Saddam Hussain (and yes, even Hitler). Saddam could argue that gassing the Kurds, butchering the Shia uprising, this all was necessary to return Iraq to proper order under his leadership.
-- -- --
Now, what you have written to me as a response goes in the same line of thought. You are arguing, that when the executive power (the president) makes a decision, the Senate must not question it. There are several reasons why this approach is wrong and leads straight to despotism.
1. The senators had the right to go on record, that they believed that Rice is the wrong candidate. Voting against her was a way of showing that. When they voted they knew that she would be confirmed anyway.
2. The process is called 'confirmation hearings' for a reason. If it was the President's sole perogative, there would be no need for them. The president's less important decisions do not need a confirmation.
3. To use your words, "the people have [NOT] spoken". Nobody elected C.Rice, she got appointed by the President. GWB got elected, but it does not follow that it is the will of the people that Rice shall be the secretary of state. A more recent example is the nomination of Miers to the Supreme Court. Even GWB's hardcore electorate is against it, which shows that he does not represent even their will.
4. All authoritarians have a deep disregard for parliaments, because they are an obstacle for their unchecked power. Throughout history they have argued, that they, a single person, are the true voice of the will of the people, and the rotten, corrupt parliaments are not.
This is a monstrous fallacy. It should be obvious to anyone that a larger elected body is closer to the electorate than a smaller one. The perfect case is the Athenian or Swiss form of direct democracy. The rule of a single person is on the opposite side of the scale. An elected government without a pluralistic parliament is not a democracy. It is an elected tyranny.
-- -- --
As regards Riefenstahl, there are no analogies to Moore. She was a producer of propaganda FOR the government, M.Moore is producing propaganda AGAINST it. (I'd agree that he is a propagandist. I observed that Moore does not give people a fair chance of explaining themselves in the 'shocumentaries'.)
And it was not my goal to say that Card is like Riefenstahl. I meant that Card believes that military victories are the result of the stronger will, not the better strategy. In Card's mind, the US can only win in Iraq by being more stubborn than the insurgents, not smarter.
OSC hates the democratic process. He glorifes ruthlessness, hierarchic controls and mindless unity. It's not simply the Ender trilogy, which I base this on.
1. Here is one of his columns: Condoleezza's Confirmation . Go read it.
Democracy cannot exist without dissent. It's a trademark of authoritarian and totalitarian systems that they demand that there never be any dissent. Card DEMANDS that the opposition must never show any disagreement with the current government, because the enemies COULD interpret this as a lack of unity and determination. (exactly how many Jihadis were watching the confirmation hearings, heh?) Apparently OSC is a strong believer in the 'Triumph of the Will'.
2. Did you read Songmaster, a novel which actually predates Ender's Game?
In this novel OSC shows a universe in which all inhabited planets are incorporated in one Empire. Through the words and actions of the characters he argues that the Emperor needs to be the most ruthless person in the world, or the empire fall into anarchy and infighting. His successor must be even more ruthless and a non-violent change of leadership is not possible - he has to kill the predecessor to show off his ruthlessness.
Maybe Ender's game isn't a glorification of Hitler, but Songmaster definitely is.
p.s I read the first homecoming book. Nothing about democracy there.
And I just counted that I have 14 books by OSC on the shelf next to my elbow. So sad. I even met OSC twice at book fairs.
Recently I read some right-wing lunatic, post-9/11 columns by him. No attempt at reasoning, only 'must follow the leader; dissent is treason' kind of diatribe. That's when I noticed that he is an authoritarian.
Did you notice that in his books, democracies are the weaklings and loosers, and the strong (or shrewd) win? And what's with this fascination with genocide?
We westerners have always done this kind of thing to Asia! I want my government to promote our monopolies abroad. I offer you five words: British East India Tea Company.
All right! That's the fine mercantilist spirit!
While we're at it, let's reinstitute the free trade in opium! I think we could sue China through the WTO Arbitrage Court for unlawful protectionism of their domestic agriculture market.
they should be called klein bites, medium bites and grand bites.
We like to think we know everything. How can we say there is global warming when we have maybe 100 years on the subject. Same thing for Hurricanes.
Global warming is 'controversial' only as long as one forgets three undeniable facts: melted water lakes in the middle of Greenland, glacier melting and permafrost melting. We have more than 100 years on documented data on the length of glaciers and they have been getting smaller at an accelarated pace.
These phenomena can not be explained by anything else than a long term change in climatic conditions.
'The power grip will be mostly used to crush human sculls.' Dr Paul Chappell added.
> I work for a startup.
I'm interested in hearing more.
> We have a number of patents pending,
> most of which we filed for three years ago,
> before we announced details of the product
> and offered it for sale.
> (This is, of course, a requirement of law.)
As you surely know, patent aplications are published after 18 months. At this point it is possible to claim quasi-ownership of the invention. To quote Wikipedia: "The marking [patent pending] serves to notify potential infringers who would copy the invention that they may be liable for damages once a patent is issued." I believe this should successfully deter the competition to the same extent as a regular patent.
> Companies don't start up, swamp the world with their product,
> IPO and make everyone billionaires in a couple of months.
> You're still stuck in Internet bubble fantasy land.
> 3-5 years is not an unreasonable time just to get a company
> going, much less actually benefit from the first few years of hard work.
It is my opinion that if it takes as much as 3 years for a company to come up
with a product, it's doing something wrong. 3 years is almost a whole era in IT terms
(almost as long as the span between Windows releases )
I suggest that you propose a software patent duration that would be satisfactory.
I didn't come up with the 3-5 years out of nowhere. It's part of Bezos' proposal, which I quote below.
------
1. That the patent laws should recognize that business method and software patents are fundamentally different than other kinds of patents.
2. That business method and software patents should have a much shorter lifespan than the current 17 years -- I would propose 3 to 5 years. This isn't like drug companies, which need longpatent windows because of clinical testing, or like complicated physical processes, where you might have to tool up and build factories. Especially in the age of the Internet, a good software innovation can catch a lot of wind in 3 or 5 years.
[...]
If done right -- and it could take 2 years or more -- we'll end up with a patent system that produces fewer patents (fewer people will bother to apply for 3 or 5 year patents, and fewerpatents means less work for the overworked Patent and Trademark Office), fewer bad patents (because of the pre-issuance comment period), and even the good patents won't last longer than is necessary to give the innovator a reasonable return (at Internet speed, you don't need 17 years). Bottom line: fewer patents, of higher average quality, with shorter lifetimes.
... only Software Patents which last for 20 years.
Patents have a limited duration time for a reason. On one hand they give the owner a temporary monopoly to use them commercially, so that he can recuperate his expenses on R&D. That's a good thing. On the other hand the law accepts that knowledge should belong to everyone, after the patent expires.
The patent duration should be adjusted to the area of research and they sometimes are. For example, in some countries patents on drugs can be extended by 5 years, because the approval process and clinical test can take up 12-15 years during which the company canot sell the drug and is loosing money.
The maximum duration of software patents should be short, ca. 3-5 years. This would give startup companies protection for their new products against blatant rip-offs by big, uncreative companies. On the other hand it would not be possible to use your portfolio of 10,000 patents from the 80s as a strategic weapon to mug the weak (aka the 'IBM tax') or nuke your competition.
Unfortunately international trade agreements (GATT) have fixed the minimum duration of patents for ALL INVENTIONS at 20 years. It's almost impossible to change international agreements. The consequence is that when a country defines software as an invention, it can not give it a shorter patent duration. The only way out would be to define a special status to software inventions.
p.s. I'm not trolling here. I'm posting this under my regular username.
dude, you got a point here.
If it's viral, then from now on let's call it the word-of-mouth disease. We had something similar in the EU in 2001 and it left awful memories of burning carcasses. That should teach the marketing gnomes!
( unfortunately, this means starting a new meme, which itself would be a viral... , oy, recurrency. )
I think you miss the point of the story. A hint is burried in the last sentence:
/..jp think about it. )
Quote: The technology for the new design seems to be in it's infancy, but Japan has proven once again that it's a least 10 years ahead of everyone else.
It's simply a gadget to troll for sarcastic comments from the clueless gaijin. ( I wonder what the people at
The thing I want to know is what was so special about Africa that large species and predators survived there.
You would think the inhabitants of N. America had the same hunting tools 13000 years ago as everyone else on the planet.
Candyoogle?
Googandy?
P.S. Steve Jobs invented nothing. CEO's don't invent, the nameless engineers at Apple invent. 'nate.oo' is a jerk for continuing this awful CEO worship cult of the '90s. I wish Orwell wrote that above passage as Big Brother inventing helicopters.
Shihar,d =12228868.
I read your comment here: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=146002&ci
"What people don't realize is that often times the people that make the technology and the people that build the technology are two very different people."
That's an observation I had myself. (Patents allow to set up specialized research companies which are separated from the production industry.) I'd like to discuss this topic with you, per email. I don't know your email adress, if you could contact me at: mg20163 AT sgh.waw.pl
It is very obvious that the USPTO management doesn't care about examiner attrition. If they did, they would have figured out safeguards against it long ago. But why should they? After all, there are always people wanting jobs there, if not birth Americans, then all the Vietnamese, Indians, and Ethiopians who have gotten their citizenships.
This reminids me of how electronic arts treats it newcomer employees. They come cheap and are expendable.
barbecued by a no longer existant ozone layer
_ Substances_that_Deplete_the_Ozone_Layer
foolish example.
The ozone layer was saved only because of "one group of people (scientists and politicians) forcing their opinions down the throats of the rest of the population (that's you), that population before forced to live under and according to the designing and ruling group's theories (also called science)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol_on
The Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer was signed by 183 nations. No amount of arogant libertarian-utopian whining will change the fact that YOU are not allowed to pump CFCs into the atmosphere even if you really wanted to.
See, here in the real world we think that SOME rules need to aply to everyone.